"Because it won't help you?"
"Because it won't help me on the road to fame. You will pose for me, won't you?"
"I'm sure I cannot say"--she answered--"perhaps--please don't let's talk about it."
"Why not?" he asked curiously.
"Because"--she answered seriously--"we have been such good friends up here in the mountains; such--such comrades. Up here in the hills, with the canyon gates shut against the world that I don't know, you are like--like Brian Oakley--and like my father used to be--and down there"--she hesitated.
"Yes," he said, "and down there I will be what?"
"I don't know," she answered wistfully, "but sometimes I can see you going on and on and on toward fame and the rewards it will bring you and you seem to get farther and farther and farther away from--from the mountains and our friendship; until you are so far away that I can't see you any more at all. I don't like to lose my mountain friends, you know."
He smiled. "But no matter how famous I might become--no matter what fame might bring me--I could not forget you and your mountains."
"I would not want you to remember me," she answered "if you were famous. That is--I mean"--she added hesitatingly--"if you were famous just because you wanted to be. But I know you could never forget the mountains. And that would be the trouble; don't you see? If you could forget, it would not matter. Ask Mr. Lagrange, he knows."
For some time Aaron King sat, without speaking, looking about at the world that was so far from that other world--the world he had always known. The girl, too,--seeming to understand the thoughts that he himself, perhaps, could not have expressed,--was silent.